Ray Stanford’s eyes went wide behind his red-rimmed glasses, and his voice went up in octaves with each uttered phrase. “Nikola Tesla? Father of Alternating Current? Inventor of the first electric car, wireless transmission of energy, and the death ray?”
Ray was tall and slender, dressed in a tweed jacket over a navy turtleneck. Offsetting his conservative academic appearance were the rims of his eyeglasses, which were a neon red that matched the oversized plastic watchband he wore with the comic book superhero emblem on the face. The statement was, “I may be a professor, but I retain my geek cred.”
“Death ray?” Smith repeated. He had only moments ago greeted the Saint John’s University adjunct professor with a dead-fish handshake that had been reciprocated in kind by the wiry African-American geologist. Smith had driven the 25 miles from Rye, which took the better part of an hour as he avoided the tolls, to secure a personal meeting with the man, and was already feeling that the effort might have been a wasted one.
“You bet!” Ray said. “Imagine a gun that emits electricity or microwave energy. I mean, that’s no different from your TV remote, really—which Tesla also invented! What else could you call something like that?” Ray began talking faster the more he got into his subject. “Of course, the government shut all that down, commandeered all his work and locked it up at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base—along with all that UFO technology.” He gave Smith a lopsided grin to indicate he was being facetious about the UFOs, unaware that Smith was immune to humor in any form.
“Did he do any work with earthquakes?” Smith asked. When he allowed the CURE computer to finally consider the numerous earthquake reports, it pointed unerringly to the eccentric inventor. He found that Stanford operated a computer website dedicated to paranormal trivia, which included several references to Tesla—so many, in fact, that it was apparent Tesla was the geologist’s favorite focus.
“Oh, yes,” Ray said with enthusiasm. “The Great Street Earthquake,” he added with a nod. Getting no response from Smith, he continued. “See, Tesla had been fiddling around in his basement with a motor no more powerful than your basic push mower. He fixed it to a beam mounted in the floor and monitored it to see if he could find the beam’s frequency by raising and lowering the vibrations. He made huge strides in the science of mechanical resonance. You know what that is, right?”
“Yes,” Smith replied, nodding.
“Basically, resonance is the tendency of an object, or a system, to oscillate with greater amplitude at some frequencies than others,” Ray continued pedantically, ignoring Smith’s statement. “If I bombard a rock with a frequency of 20 Megahertz, it will vibrate at a certain rate. If I hit it with 30 Megahertz, it will vibrate at a different rate. With trial and error, you eventually find the resonant frequency of the object, when the frequency causes the object to vibrate the fastest.”
“The greater the frequency, the greater the vibration,” Smith said drily. “So what?”
“Well, it’s not just that,” Ray said. “You can overshoot the frequency and not hit the resonance of the object. It’s the same principle behind soldiers breaking step when they walk over a bridge.”
Smith nodded. Finally the academic had used an allegory he could relate to. “Because marching in step causes the bridge to vibrate,” Smith said, nodding.
“And maybe even break apart!” Ray grinned, glad to see he was reaching his new pupil. “You’ve seen opera singers break a wineglass with their voice? Mechanical resonance is pretty much the same thing, only the system in question is a…well, a mechanical one.”
“A machine.”
“Well, not necessarily something man-made,” Ray said, removing his glasses for a quick polish before pushing them back into place. “Any system that involves force and movement could be considered a mechanical system. Anyway, while Tesla wasn’t making much progress in his basement with that steel beam, outside, store windows up and down the street were shaking and shattering like an earthquake was happening. The police were called, and he shut off the motor. It was an accident, but later he tried it again intentionally on a building under construction, and in just a few minutes he reported that the structure started to wobble. Another ten minutes and he could have brought it down. He claimed he could drop the whole Brooklyn Bridge in less than an hour doing that if he wanted.”
Ray’s energy was causing his glasses to steam up again with sweat. “But it was his plans for the wireless transmission of energy that was the really cool stuff,” he continued. “Nobody believed him, though—or they believed him and worked to discredit him. Edison had friends in high places.”
“So he could tear anything apart, just by shaking it the right way?” Smith said, trying to steer the conversation back on track. “No matter how big? Even, say, planet-sized?”
Ray coughed politely. “Planet-sized, sir? Oh, you must be thinking of The Great Scare!” He seemed to have a book title for every misadventure in Tesla’s biography. “He caused quite a panic with that theory! A thousand pounds of dynamite set off about every two hours, and he said he could crack the Earth like a boy cracks an egg—in just a few months.”
“Do you think he was right?”
“About the timing and forces necessary?” Ray shrugged. “Probably. The man never gave out a number unless he was absolutely sure. But he also said it couldn’t be done because nobody could accurately plot the peaks and ebbs of the Earth’s periodicity.”
“That was then, though,” Smith said. “Do you think someone could do it today?”
Ray steepled his index fingers and tapped them against his chin, the vibrations of which sent his vermillion-rimmed spectacles sliding down the bridge of his nose. “It’d be an interesting experiment,” he said. His voice began to trail off as he began talking more to himself than Smith, already drawing up the tests in his head. “I suppose it could be done, given enough resources. It would be extremely expensive. You’d have to set up a number of drilling sites all over the world…”
“Drilling sites?” Smith said. “Like oil wells?”
“Exactly,” Ray nodded enthusiastically. “Oil drills would be perfect, so long as they didn’t actually find any oil,” he added bitterly.
If Smith had pursed his lips together any tighter, they would have merged. He had selected Ray Stanford from a list of candidates based on grant applications. “Fascinating,” he said. “Maybe someone will get us those statistics someday. And speaking of oil, that brings me to the real purpose of my visit.”
“I was wondering why the Department of Conservation was interested in my blog,” Ray said nervously. “You post enough government conspiracies, you start to believe some of them and expect to get a visit.”
Smith gave a thin-lipped smile that probably reinforced any belief Stanford had in aliens as he reached inside his jacket and retrieved a manila envelope, “Nothing so dramatic,” he said. “You applied for a grant a while back to study the effects of fracking on the aquifer systems of South Dakota.”
Ray’s eyes widened. “Well, yes, but that was declined some time back.”
“It’s been reconsidered,” Smith said, forcing a smile. “Will one hundred and fifty get you started?”
“One hundred and fifty thousand?” Ray couldn’t believe his luck as he took the envelope from Smith and counted the zeroes on the bank draft inside, evaporating most of the idle conversation that had just enjoyed about Tesla and mechanical resonance and oil drilling.
“We think you can do your country a valuable service,” Smith said honestly. “Go forth and research.”
Smith started for the door. “Thank you!” Ray called after him, as if startling awake from a dream. “Hey, I wasn’t kidding about that death ray stuff. He tried to tell folks he could transmit unlimited power without wires and they laughed at him. He said he’d show them all the true power of it and disappeared. Three days later? Boom! Tunguska!”
“I thought that was a meteor strike,” Smith said, his hand resting on the doorknob.
“Meteor strikes leave meteor fragments,” Ray grinned, staring down at his new financing. “Check it out sometime.”
· · ·
All the drive back to Rye, New York, Smith mulled over information. He realized he could have called Professor Stanford for the information, but he wanted to make sure the conversation was forgotten, and money was the great amnesiac. Now, as he sat at his desk back at Folcroft Sanitarium, he was beginning to wonder if he had made a mistake—if perhaps he did not have the time to be wasting. His stomach was curdling. If his suspicions panned out, he could not even consider the ramifications, particularly if the world found out.
It was Stanford’s hypothesis about using oil well exploration that had nearly clinched it for him, but there were still too many holes left in the pattern.
Or maybe there weren’t that many holes after all. Maybe he just was not considering all the viable options.
Smith took a cleansing breath and picked up the phone. To his surprise, it was answered on the first ring.
“Not really a great time, Smitty,” Remo said. “I’m making them take Chiun back to La Haule, and they’re not real happy about it.”
“I’ll make the arrangements, Remo,” Smith said. “But I need to know something. What time did those explosions happen?”
“Both of them?” Remo asked. “The first one just before lunch. The other closer to three in the afternoon.”
“Can you be more precise?”
“More precise? 11:32 AM and 3:10 PM,” Remo stated. “Give or take ten seconds.”
Smith looked for the opportunities he didn’t want to see, and saw them. Adjusting for time zones, both explosions fit precisely into Jake Riser’s spreadsheet of times. The explosions weren’t just happening with frequency, they were happening on a schedule. Mechanical resonance—on a global scale.
“Remo, things are worse than we thought,” Smith said.